Endangered Species Mitigation Needs Assessment

Abstract

The Illinois Department of Transportation, like most other state transportation agencies, must undergo an environmental review for each transportation project. IDOT identified several challenges that involve regulatory and implementation of federal and state laws protecting threatened and endangered species. We evaluated each state’s environmental review process as it pertained to statutes governing state imperiled species (i.e., threatened, and endangered, rare, or otherwise imperiled). Our recommendations from this review of what other state transportation and natural resource agencies have done to improve environmental review processes at the state level include establishing liaison agents with outside regulatory agencies. We also suggest that IDOT, after establishing a liaison, work with each agency to evaluate species or habitats that repeatedly cause issues to project timelines and budgets. Conservation banking and advanced mitigation frameworks are often built upon state legislation that would require conservation banks to be established or a series of programmatic agreements and other instruments into a comprehensive plan, respectively. Lastly, research funding, often a favorite of state agencies because it is easy to implement, often does not prevent species loss from occurring. Our research has identified successful examples from other state transportation agencies that have improved upon the efficiency and predictability of compensatory mitigation for the incidental take of threatened and endangered species.